It's been a while since I blogged attended a conference, so when I saw the Social Now announcement and knowing that Amsterdam is only 1 hour by train from Delft, the decision to register was quickly made. I saw Samuel Driessen is the event chair and some of the presenter's names are familiar (bloggers / twitterers), so even more reason to go.
Monday April 20th, I arrived early at Pakhuis de Zwijger in Amsterdam, the venue for the event. The set-up of Social Now is not like the usual conference, with keynote speakers, many presentations and some room for discussion. Ana Neves, who is the conference organizers, is trying to get more interaction between the presenters and the audience, which works well as the number of participants is not very high (60?, hard to tell). At the same time, there are no sales pitches by vendors allowed. No, an almost real case is developed (by Ana) that the vendors use to present the possibilities of their tools. And then there is a 3-person judge that looks at the business, IT and user side of the tool. At the end of the event (after 10 presentations), all participants could put their votes into four categories (best presentation, most suitable tool for my organization, coolest product, coolest feature).
Just a comment: in this post, I'm not going to summarize everything of the day. Simply because I didn't take sufficient notes. And there are many sources online that did a better job than I can do here, so I'll try to link to those!
Before we go to the case and the tool presentations of the first day, Dana Leeson (BSI) gave a keynote presentation. Dana wants to challenge us in her presentation that was titled "The Social Workplace Tipping Point; Are you in the Best Position?". One of the topics she brought up that stuck to my mind was the shift from BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) via CYOD (Choose Your Own Device) to CYOT (Choose Your Own Tool). It's interesting to think about what CYOT means. I've seen it happening in a company with many smart techies who built their own tools, because the available tools weren't satisfying. The problem is that information exchange is impossible between the tools, so they create silos. Is CYOT something we want? (Freedom versus silos) I talked with Dana about it later and she agrees that CYOT has advantages and disadvantages, but it is something that happens in organizations.
Another interesting topic, which kept coming back the two days, is employee engagement. Dana's main message: the gold standard (of employee engagement), stop that! There is no need for an employee to be involved in every activity. One other comment from Dana: “Collaboration is a mythical beast that can never be found”. People just don’t strive for the same goal.
On a side note: I found out that Dana is from Waterloo (and yes, the same Waterloo that I lived for 6 years). She now lives in the UK, but it was nice to find out we share similar views on this Canadian city.
Now we get to the fictional case of Cableinc, developed and presented by Ana Neves. Cableinc is a cable maker, has 1200 employees spread over 4 locations in 3 countries. Manufacturing company that also delivers services (installation, for example). In their plans is a new facilitation that will be built in Turkey. It's one of the different story lines that the tool vendors can choose to demonstrate their product. Requirements: no sales pitch, no slides, presentation with the tool. Quite some work for the vendors, but it made for a more realistic presentation of the tools.
On the first day we saw presentations by Iris Intranet, Jamespot, KanBo and (after the lunch) Brikit, IBM Connections /XCC (Time to Act Group), MangoApps. Good I made notes for the voting later, otherwise I would have lost track already of the different tools and the features they offer!
The day ended with short presentations by Luis Suarez "Reducing Email Dependency" (for the people who follow his blog it's no surprise he promotes a work life without email), Carsten Rossi "Improving Internal Communications", Paul Corney "Improving Knowledge Retention" and Phill Kropp "Increasing Adoption of Social Tools". The presentations ended with a debate between these men and the audience (when they were able to break into the presenters who really got up to speed in the debate!).
Few more returning /new / interesting topics: Working out loud (WOL), Random coffee meetings (invitation to drink coffee with a random person in the organization), Narrative grid, Gamification. And "Content is king".
(I get an error when adding pictures, so for now plain text!)
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